Saturday, June 19, 2004

There is a paragraph in Northern California author Roy Parvin's novella Betty Hutton that may just sum up thematically the intent of his work thus far. The protagonist, Gibbs, is a troubled man with a history of finding trouble:

But it was what stood at his back, the ocean of land behind Gibbs, that pulled at him like a tide. He'd never been farther west than the eastern fringe of Pennsylvania, had never been anywhere. He'd heard about Montana, though, a place that sounded like everything hadn't yet been decided, where there still might be some time left. A cellmate had told him of the chinooks, the southerly winds capable of turning winter into spring in a matter of hours, sometimes a ninety-degree temperature swing, and it had seemed to Gibbs lying in their dank cement crib, it seemed as if such a thing as the chinooks was possible, anything was.

One has to wonder whether if, in the crucible of our current troubled times, the threadbare cliché of personal redemption in literature, let alone in real life, has become almost meaningless. Roy Parvin's well-drawn characters and elegant prose seem to hold out the promise that there are possibilities, at the very least.

Roy's name may not yet be a household name, but he seems to be moving in that direction. His work is receiving numerous prestigious awards and he was granted a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in December 2003. He splits his time between households in the Bay Area and the Trinity Alps, which provide many of the settings for his work. His book of short stories, the Loneliest Road in America,came out in 1997, and his three novellas "In The Snow Forest" was published in 2000. He is currently writing a novel.

Saturday, June 12, 2004

STEVE SANDER has appeared in various shows put on by Writers On The Edge. He was a featured author more than once and appeared in Vaudvillaineous Poets, and "The Memory Place."

STEVE SANDER'S interest in acting and performance was nurtured at the Portland Civic Theatre and as a founding member of the Columbia Theater Company in Portland. He served as the Poetry Editor for Spectrum Magazine of the Arts while making his living in a natural foods bakery, a men's clothing store, as a job counselor with the City of Portland, and as a small business owner. Sander is a poet, songwriter, guitar player and ex-New Yorker who settled in Oregon in 1971. On the closing of Cafe Lena, he said, "The past ten years have been the best twenty of our lives!"

Steve Sander is married to Leanne Grabel and they have two lovely and talented daughters.

LEANNE GRABEL has appeared in various shows put on by Writers On The Edge. She was a featured author at the very first Yachats Writers' Series, held June 20, 1997 and has returned to the stage here as part of her writing critique group, Vaudvillaineous Poets, and "The Memory Place."

Leanne was co-founder and co-owner of Cafe Lena, the infamous literary cafe in Portland. She is the author of the books Lonesome and Very Quarrelsome Heroes , and The Family Fate Ate, and is the editor of Prison Poetry Project, a compilation of writing and photography by incarcerated violent offenders in MacLaren Youth Correction Facility. Her chapbooks include There's a Pig Running Free , Anne Sexton Was a Sexpot, The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath, Short Poems by a Short Person, Flirtations, and The Heart .

Her poetry-based theatrical shows include One Woman Shoe, The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression, The Circus of Anguish & Mirth, and most recently, Anger: The Musical all of which have been produced on various Portland stages. She teaches poetry to at-risk teenagers in summer camps, Portland public schools and juvenile prisons.